There is dispute among EAs--and the general public more broadly--about whether morality is objective. So I thought I'd kick off a debate about this, and try to draw more people into reading and posting on the forum! Here is my opening volley in the debate, and I encourage others to respond.
Unlike a lot of effective altruists and people in my segment of the internet, I am a moral realist. I think morality is objective. I thought I'd set out to defend this view.
Let’s first define moral realism. It’s the idea that there are some stance independent moral truths. Something is stance independent if it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks or feels about it. So, for instance, that I have arms is stance independently true—it doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about it. That ice cream is tasty is stance dependently true; it might be tasty to me but not to you, and a person who thinks it’s not tasty isn’t making an error.
So, in short, moral realism is the idea that there are things that you should or shouldn’t do and that this fact doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks about them. So, for instance, suppose you take a baby and hit it with great force with a hammer. Moral realism says:
- You’re doing something wrong.
- That fact doesn’t depend on anyone’s beliefs about it. You approving of it, or the person appraising the situation approving of it, or society approving of it doesn’t determine its wrongness (of course, it might be that what makes its wrong is its effects on the baby, resulting in the baby not approving of it, but that’s different from someone’s higher-level beliefs about the act. It’s an objective fact that a particular person won a high-school debate round, even though that depended on what the judges thought).
Moral realism says that some moral statements are true and this doesn’t depend on what people think about it. Now, there are only three possible ways any particular moral statement can fail to be stance independently true:
- It’s neither true nor false.
- It’s false.
- It’s true but stance dependently—so it depends on what someone thinks about it.
But lots of moral statements just really don’t seem like any of these. The wrongness of slavery, the holocaust, baby torture, stabbing people in the eye—it seems like all these things really are wrong and this fact doesn’t depend on what people think about it. It seems very weird to think that what makes it wrong to torture people is what someone thinks about it—even weirder that statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false.
The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim that moral sentences are like commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is abortion wrong?” or “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion.” This shows that moral statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.
Now, there are all sorts of tricky ways people modify the view that moral sentences are neither true nor false to get around these counterexamples. I can’t discuss them in detail, but I can only say that they tend to be very gerrymandered and ad hoc, and while perhaps they can affirm the same sentences moral realists say, they don’t agree with the meanings. They’re analogous to religious liberals who say things like “God exists, but by that I mean that there’s love in the world.” Worse, they imply statements like “torture is wrong,” are neither true nor false. But they seem true!
Denying objective morality is counterintuitive in a second, very different way. If there are stance-independent reasons—reasons to care about things that don’t depend on what you actually care about—then moral realism is almost definitely true. Once that anti-realist admits there are reasons to care independent of your desires, it seems those reasons should give rise to moral reasons. If I have a reason to prevent my own suffering, it seems that suffering is bad, which gives me a moral reason to prevent it.
But this means that moral anti-realists must think that you can never have a reason to care about something independent of what you actually do care about. This is crazy as shown by the following cases:
- A person wants to eat a car. They know they’d get no enjoyment from it—the whole experience would be quite painful and unpleasant. On moral anti-realism, they’re not being irrational. They have no reason to take a different action.
- A person desires, at some time, to procrastinate. They know it’s bad for them, but they don’t want to do their tasks. On anti-realism, this is not a rational failing.
- A person wants to torture themselves. They have this desire—despite getting no joy from it—despite knowing the relevant facts. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational.
- A four-year-old wants a cookie to be shaped like a triangle. They are willing to endure great future agony for this. On anti-realism, they’re not being irrational—so long as they’re informed about the relevant facts.
- A person has a very strong desire to be skinny. This motivates them to starve to death—leaving behind a life of joy and fulfillment. On anti-realism, one has no reason to not to do this. It might be bad, but one can’t claim that they’re acting foolishly.
- A person is depressed and cuts themself. When they do it, they are fully informed about the long-term consequences. On anti-realism, they are not acting irrationally.
This is all completely nuts! We take it as a totally ordinary assumption in normal life that there are some things that aren’t worth pursuing—that one is a fool to pursue. Anti-realism can’t maintain that obvious intuition. We call people mentally ill when they have certain aims, even when informed of the relevant facts, because we recognize it’s a sign of irrationality!
Okay, so far I’ve argued that moral anti-realism implies things that are really counterintuitive. It implies things that seem false when you think about them. But is this a problem? Anti-realists often admit that their position is counterintuitive, but think this isn’t a defect. The facts, after all, do not care about your feelings.
But I think this gets wrong how we come to know things. Consider the belief that, say, the law of non-contradiction is true. How do we know that? Or the belief that if space isn’t curved the shortest distance between two points is a line. Or even the belief that there’s an external world.
The way we know these things is by relying on appearances. We think about the subject and it appears that, say, a thing can’t both be a way and not be that way at the same time in the same sense. Our foundational beliefs are justified on the basis of them seeming right.
Visual experience is a good analogy here. When I see a table, I think there really is a table. Because it appears that there’s a table, I think I’m justified in believing there to be one unless given a strong reason to doubt it. Could I be hallucinating? Sure! But unless given a reason to think that I am, I shouldn’t think so.
But just as there are visual appearances, there are intellectual appearances. Just as it appears to me that there’s a table in front of me, it appears to me that it’s wrong to torture babies. Just as I should think there’s a table absent a good reason to doubt it, I should think it’s wrong to torture babies. In fact, I should be more confident in the wrongness of torturing babies, because that seems less likely to be the result of error. It seems more likely I’m hallucinating a table than that I’m wrong about the wrongness of baby torture.
People often object to relying on intuitions. But I’m curious how they get their foundational beliefs. One’s most basic beliefs always seem justified by the fact that they seem right. Such people should explain how they know that the physical world exists, the laws of non-contradiction and identity are true, the greater is greater than the lesser, something can’t have a color without a shape, and that the cumulative case for either atheism or theism is better than the other without relying at all on how things seem.
Now, people point out that our intuitions conflict and are historically contingent. But intuitionists don’t say that intuitions are infallible or that we should never revise them in light of evidence. We say that intuitions are the starting point on which you build your beliefs, but that upon learning new things, you should still obviously update your beliefs. Showing intuitions go wrong in various cases tells us nothing about their general reliability. It would be like saying you can’t trust that there’s a table in front of you because people sometimes hallucinate.
Furthermore, it’s hard to see how, absent relying on intuition, people know that our intuitions really are ever wrong. For instance, a common class of intuition that we know is wrong is that we have weird views about probability—we often think that the odds of A and B are higher than the odds of A alone. But absent relying on intuition, how do you know that the odds of A and B aren’t higher than the odds of A alone? The critics of intuitions rely on intuitions to discredit them.
Moral realists aren’t special pleading. We believe in moral facts for the same reason that we believe in any other basic kind of fact.
Now, anti-realists have a bunch of arguments and I can’t address them all. But let me just address three of them.
The first common one is the argument from disagreement. People argue that because we disagree about morality, it can’t be objective. But this misunderstands what it means for something to be objective. Something objective is true and its truth doesn’t depend on what you think about it. It won’t necessarily be known by everyone.
There’s an objective fact about the right theory of physics, whether God exists, and even whether morality is objective. But those things generate plenty of disagreement. So disagreement can’t be enough to necessitate subjectivity. Now, there are more complicated ways of making the argument, but I don’t really think any of them stick. Lots of other domains have similar disagreement to moral realism while being squarely objective.
The second common argument against moral realism is the argument from queerness. This argument says that moral facts are super weird. They’re utterly different from anything else. For this reason, you shouldn’t beleive in them as they’re just too foreign and alien.
But the world has lots of weird things. Fields, epistemic facts, planets, energy, mathematical facts, propositions, particles, God, consciousness, and much more. Sure morality is different—it’s about what you should do—but all these things are different from the others. The world is filled with weird stuff, so I don’t know why moral facts’ weirdness would be disqualifying.
Furthermore, it’s unclear why moral realism is supposed to be weird. It doesn’t seem weird to me that some things are bad. I’ve never heard a good explanation of what about moral realism makes it so weird. It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.
The only decent explanation I’ve heard of what’s supposed to be weird about morality is that it’s non-natural. Moral facts aren’t made of atoms—they’re not part of the physical world. But, such objectors claim, all the things that exist are parts of the physical world. Therefore, moral facts would be a new, radically different sort of thing.
But I reject that all the stuff that exists is physical. I think there’s lots of non-physical stuff—modal facts, God, consciousness, souls, mathematical facts, logical facts, epistemic facts, and so on. Some of those are controversial, but others are pretty plausible.
Take modal facts, for instance. Those are facts about what’s possible and necessary. So, for example, the fact that a married bachelor is impossible is a modal fact. That’s not a physical fact—it’s not about the physical world. It would have been true even if there never had been a physical universe, and it was true before the universe. It’s not merely the claim that there are no married bachelors but that there can’t be any—that them existing is impossible. But that fact isn’t about the physical world.
Or take logical facts. Any argument with true premises of the form “if P then Q, P,” will have a true conclusion. That’s not a fact about the physical world. It didn’t start being true at the big bang. It’s a necessary truth, with similar status to the moral facts.
Finally, consider epistemic facts. These are facts about what it’s reasonable to believe—what you should believe. For example “it’s irrational to believe what’s opposed by the evidence,” or “it’s irrational to believe there are square circles just because you find them cool.” That is, once again, not a fact about the physical world. But it’s a true fact. Like moral facts, epistemic facts are about what you should do—in this case, what you should believe, what reason demands you believe. Those who reject moral realism would seem to also have to reject epistemic realism and thus think that a person who claims that they think moral realism is true because they like the idea isn’t being irrational.
The last major objection to moral realism is called the evolutionary debunking argument. This argument says that evolution shaped our moral beliefs. The reason that we believe that torture is wrong is because believing that was evolutionarily beneficial. But crucially, believing that being beneficial doesn’t depend on it being true—it would be just as beneficial if it was false. So if our moral beliefs are shaped by blind evolutionary processes, it would be a miracle if they turn out to be right.
But I think even in cases like this, where someone tells a just-so story about how you might come to mistakenly believe what you do about some subject, you still have to evaluate their plausibility. You could tell a similar debunking story about our belief in the law of non-contradiction. But I think in such cases, we just have to consider the plausibility of the belief and see that, even though they can tell a consistent story of how you come to mistakenly intuit some fact, their account is less plausible.
Like, suppose that I give the theory that everything in the world was created by a brain worm. You point out that that’s crazy—a brain worm being fundamental is very complicated, it can’t make the world. I say that the brain worm is fundamental and misleads you into thinking it’s complicated plus that complexity is a virtue plus that brain worms can’t create the world. I point out that people often are misled by brain worms. It’s true that I can tell an internally consistent story of how you come to be mistaken across the board, but the story is just not at all plausible. Same with the story on which all of our beliefs about morality are wrong—random side effects of blind evolution.
Or suppose that I try to debunk the existence of love. I note that it would be evolutionarily beneficial to think you’re in love because that aids in reproduction. Adding love to your ontology is an extra posit. While I could tell an internally consistent debunking story, one would need to evaluate its plausibility. And such a story wouldn’t be plausible—it would be very unintuitive, just like the debunking story of the anti-realist.
Now, is it true that our evolutionary beliefs are the byproducts of blind chance so that it would be a huge coincidence if they were true? No, I don’t think so. Here’s my account of how we have true moral beliefs: evolution makes us super smart, and then we figure out the moral truths. This is the same way we come to have true beliefs about modal facts, logical facts, mathematical facts, and so on. There’s no special challenge for moral facts (now, I think us having such rational capacities is surprising on atheism, but to account for how we know tons of other things, we should already grant that we have those rational capacities even if we’re atheists).
So if you think you know stuff about math—like that there are infinite prime numbers—then however you explain that will apply also to the moral domain.
Why should we accept this account? Well, mostly for the reason I explain above—that it’s the only way to make sense of our moral knowledge, which we have, as shown by the arguments given above. But furthermore, it’s a better explanation of our moral beliefs.
We believe lots of random things about morality that seem to have no clear evolutionary benefit. We believe that people on the other side of the world matter intrinsically as much as nearer ones (some people don’t but many do), that the better than relation is transitive (if A is better than B and B is better than C then A is better than C), that spatiotemporal location doesn’t affect one’s moral worth, that if A is wrong and B is wrong then doing A then B is wrong, and so on.
Many of these don’t plausibly enhance survival, and are niche and formal. This makes sense if we’re really figuring out the moral facts. In contrast, on anti-realism, you’d expect most of our moral beliefs to be geared towards survival—believing having many kids is obligatory. It would be surprising that many of the strongest intuitions—like the belief in transitivity—are things that are formal, non-emotional, and don’t plausibly directly enhance our survival.
Of course, I’d grant that many of our moral intuitions are affected by evolution. Evolution gives us many false moral inclinations, but those can be overcome by sufficient reflection. An analogy with mathematics is appropriate—we have some unreliable mathematical intuitions because of evolution, but we can still form many true mathematical beliefs by reflecting.
Finally—and I know this won’t move atheists, but just explaining my views—I reject the evolutionary debunking argument because I believe in God. If God exists and wants us to know the truth about morality, it makes sense that we’d have true moral beliefs and set up the world such that the evolutionary process produces us with true moral beliefs.
Moral anti-realism is certainly an internally consistent position. But it’s a very implausible one. It gives up many of the most obvious truth about the world—the stance independent wrongness of torture—on the basis of super lame arguments. Absent some extremely compelling reason to accept it, we should remain convinced that it’s false. Some things really are wrong.
[Vote explanation]: The most important reason for my favoring moral realism is my sense that some goals (e.g. promoting happiness, averting misery) are intrinsically more rationally warranted than others (like promoting misery and averting happiness).
In the same way that some things are true and worth believing, some things are good and worth desiring. We should ultimately find the notion of justified goals to be no more deeply mysterious than that of justified beliefs. To deny the objective reality of either goodness or truth would seem to undermine inquiry, and there's no deeply compelling reason to do so. (For one thing: in order for there to be a suitably objective normative reason, normative realism would have to be true!)
You were negative toward the idea of hypothetical imperatives elsewhere but I don't see how you get around the need for them.
You say epistemic and moral obligations work "in the same way," but they don't. Yes, we have epistemic obligations to believe true things... in order to have accurate beliefs about reality. That's a specific goal. But you can't just assert "some things are good and worth desiring" without specifying... good according to what standard? The existence of epistemic standards doesn't prove there's One True Moral Standard any more than the existence of chess rules prove there's One True Game.
For morality, there are facts about which actions would best satisfy different value systems. I consider those to be a form of objective moral facts. And if you have those value systems, I think it is thus rationally warranted to desire those outcomes and pursue those actions. But I don't know how you would get facts about which value system to have without appealing to a higher-order value system.
Far from undermining inquiry, this view improves it by forcing explicitness about our goals. When you feel "promoting happiness is obviously better than promoting misery," that doesn't strike me as metaphysical truth but expressive assertivism. Real inquiry means examining why we value what we value and how to get it.
I'm far from a professional philosopher and I know you have deeply studied this much more than I have, so I don't mean to accuse you of being naive. Looking forward to learning more.
It's an interesting dialectic! I don't have heaps of time to go into depth on this, but you may get a better sense of my view from reading my response to Maguire & Woods, 'Why Belief is No Game':
Thanks!
I think all reasons are hypothetical, but some hypotheticals (like "if you want to avoid unnecessary suffering...") are so deeply embedded in human psychology that they feel categorical. This explains our moral intuitions without mysterious metaphysical facts.
The concentration camp guard example actually supports my view - we think the guard shouldn't follow professional norms precisely because we're applying a different value system (human welfare over rule-following). There's no view from nowhere; there's just the fact that (luckily) most of us share similar core values.
Do you think there's an epistemic fact of the matter as to what beliefs about the future are most reasonable and likely to be true given the past? (E.g., whether we should expect future emeralds to be green or grue?) Is probability end-relational too? Objective norms for inductive reasoning don't seem any less metaphysically mysterious than objective norms for practical reasoning.
One could just debunk all philosophical beliefs as mere "deeply embedded... intuitions" so as to avoid "mysterious metaphysical facts". But that then leaves you committed to thinking that all open philosophical questions - many of which seem to be sensible things to wonder about - are actually total nonsense. (Some do go this way, but it's a pretty extreme view!) We project green, the grue-speaker projects grue, and that's all there is to say. I just don't find such radical skepticism remotely credible. You might as well posit that the world was created 5 minutes ago, or that solipsism is true, in order to further trim down your ontology. I'd rather say: parsimony is not the only theoretical virtue; actually accounting for the full range of real questions we can ask matters too!
(I'm more sympathetic to the view that we can't know the answers to these questions than to the view that there is no real question here to ask.)
You raise a fair challenge about epistemic norms! Yes, I do think there are facts about which beliefs are most reasonable given evidence. But I'd argue this actually supports my view rather than undermining it.
The key difference: epistemic norms have a built-in goal - accurate representation of reality. When we ask "should I expect emeralds to be green or grue?" we're implicitly asking "in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality, what should I expect?" The standard is baked into the enterprise of belief formation itself.
But moral norms lack this inherent goal. When you say some goals are "intrinsically more rationally warranted," I'd ask: warranted for what purpose? The hypothetical imperative lurks even in your formulation. Yes, promoting happiness over misery feels obviously correct to us - but that's because we're humans with particular values, not because we've discovered some goal-independent truth.
I'm not embracing radical skepticism or saying moral questions are nonsense. I'm making a more modest claim: moral questions make perfect sense once we specify the evaluative standard. "Is X wrong according to utilitarianism?" has a determinate, objective, mind-indpendent answer. "Is X wrong simpliciter?" does not.
The fact that we share deep moral intuitions (like preferring happiness to misery) is explained by our shared humanity, not by those intuitions tracking mind-independent moral facts. After all, we could imagine beings with very different value systems who would find our intuitions as arbitrary as we might find theirs.
So yes, I think we can know things about the future and have justified beliefs. But that's because "justified" in epistemology means "likely to be true" - there's an implicit standard. In ethics, we need to make our standards explicit.
Why couldn't someone disagree with you about the purpose of belief-formation: "sure, truth-seeking feels obviously correct to you, but that's just because [some story]... not because we've discovered some goal-independent truth."
Further, part of my point with induction is that merely aiming at truth doesn't settle the hard questions of epistemology (any more than aiming at the good settles the hard questions of axiology).
To see this: suppose that, oddly enough, the grue-speakers turn out to be right that all new emeralds discovered after 2030 are observed to be (what we call) blue. Surprising! Still, I take it that as of 2025, it was reasonable for us to expect future emeralds to be green, and unreasonable of the grue-speakers to expect them to be grue. Part of the challenge I meant to raise for you was: What grounds this epistemic fact? (Isn't it metaphysically mysterious to say that green as a property is privileged over "grue" for purposes of inductive reasoning? What could make that true, on your view? Don't you need to specify your "inductive standards"?)
Once you fully specify the evaluative standard, there is no open question left to ask, just concealed tautologies. You've replaced all the important moral questions with trivial logical ones. ("Does P&Q&R imply P?") Normative questions it no longer makes sense to ask on your view include:
And in the epistemic case (once we extend your view to cover inductive standards):
You're right that I need to bite the bullet on epistemic norms too and I do think that's a highly effective reply. But at the end of the day, yes, I think "reasonable" in epistemology is also implicitly goal-relative in a meta-ethical sense - it means "in order to have beliefs that accurately track reality." The difference is that this goal is so universally shared, so universal across so many different value systems, and so deeply embedded in the concept of belief itself that it feels categorical.
You say I've "replaced all the important moral questions with trivial logical ones," but that's unfair. The questions remain very substantive - they just need proper framing:
Instead of "Which view is better justified?" we ask "Which view better satisfies [specific criteria like internal consistency, explanatory power, alignment with considered judgments, etc.]?"
Instead of "Would the experience machine be good for me?" we ask "Would it satisfy my actual values / promote my flourishing / give me what I reflectively endorse / give me what an idealized version of myself might want?"
These aren't trivial questions! They're complex empirical and philosophical questions. What I'm denying is that there's some further question -- "But which view is really justified?" -- floating free of any standard of justification.
Your challenge about moral uncertainty is interesting, but I'd say: yes, you can hedge across different moral theories if you have a higher-order standard for managing that uncertainty (like maximizing expected moral value across theories you find plausible). That's still goal-relative, just at a meta-level.
The key insight remains: every "should" or "justified" implicitly references some standard. Making those standards explicit clarifies rather than trivializes our discussions. We're not eliminating important questions - we're revealing what we're actually asking.
I agree it's often helpful to make our implicit standards explicit. But I disagree that that's "what we're actually asking". At least in my own normative thought, I don't just wonder about what meets my standards. And I don't just disagree with others about what does or doesn't meet their standards or mine. I think the most important disagreement of all is over which standards are really warranted.
On your view, there may not be any normative disagreement, once we all agree about the logical and empirical facts. I think it's key to philosophy that there is more we can wonder about than just that. (There may not be any tractable disagreement once we get down to bedrock clashing standards, but I think there is still a further question over which we really disagree, even if we have no way to persuade the other of our position.)
It's interesting to consider the meta question of whether one of us is really right about our present metaethical dispute, or whether all you can say is that your position follows from your epistemic standards and mine follows from mine, and there is no further objective question about which we even disagree.
Really warranted by what? I think I'm an illusionist about this in particular as I don't even know what we could be reasonably disagreeing over.
For a disagreement about facts (is this blue?), we can argue about actual blueness (measurable) or we can argue about epistemics (which strategies most reliably predict the world?) and meta-epistemics (which strategies most reliably figure out strategies that reliably predict the world?), etc.
For disagreements about morals (is this good?), we can argue about goodness but what is goodness? Is it platonic? Is it grounded in God? I'm not even sure what there is to dispute. I'd argue the best we can do is argue to our shared values (perhaps even universal human values, perhaps idealized by arguing about consistency etc.) and then see what best satisfies those.
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Right - and this matches our experience! When moral disagreements persist after full empirical and logical agreement, we're left with clashing bedrock intuitions. You want to insist there's still a fact about who's ultimately correct, but can't explain what would make it true.
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I think we're successfully engaging in a dispute here and that does kind of prove my position. I'm trying to argue that you're appealing to something that just doesn't exist and that this is inconsistent with your epistemic values. Whether one can ground a judgement about what is "really warranted" is a factual question.
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I want to add that your recent post on meta-metaethical realism also reinforces my point here. You worry that anti-realism about morality commits us to anti-realism about philosophy generally. But there's a crucial disanalogy: philosophical discourse (including this debate) works precisely because we share epistemic standards - logical consistency, explanatory power, and various other virtues. When we debate meta-ethics or meta-epistemology, we're not searching for stance-independent truths but rather working out what follows from our shared epistemic commitments.
The "companions in guilt" argument fails because epistemic norms are self-vindicating in a way moral norms aren't. To even engage in rational discourse about what's true (including about anti-realism), we must employ epistemic standards. But we can coherently describe worlds with radically different moral standards. There's no pragmatic incoherence in moral anti-realism the way there would be in global philosophical anti-realism.
I am not sure there even are intuitions or seemings of the sort philosophers often talk about, but if I were to weigh in on the matter, I'd have the exact opposite reaction. I can think of few things more obvious than that it doesn't make any sense to think some goals are more rational or correct than others. Goals are just descriptive facts about agents. They don't even seem like an appropriate target of evaluation for such judgments. To me, this sounds like saying that someone's birthday is more rationally warranted.
I also don't see why denying the objective reality of goodness would undermine inquiry. Why would it? I act in pursuit of my goals. Inquiry is a means of pursuing my goals. I don't even think it makes sense to talk of things being objectively good, but even if there were objective goods, I would not care about them.
Regarding the last remark: that there's no "deeply compelling reason to do so," you go on to say "For one thing: in order for there to be a suitably objective normative reason, normative realism would have to be true!"
But "deeply compelling" is not, to my mind, identical to "objective." I don't believe I or anyone else needs or benefits in any way from having objective reasons to do anything. We can do things because we want to. We don't need any more "reason" (if desires could be construed as reasons) than that.
So one way of thinking about this is as follows. Imagine you're goal is to eat every apple you see. I show you an apple. You acknowledge that it is in fact an apple, and you have seen the apple. I say you should then eat the apple. You refuse to eat the apple. My view is that you (epistemically) ought to have eaten the apple. There is a normativity about reasons (and logic) that suggest I am justified in saying this. If you reject normativity about epistemic reasons, it seems to me that you don't have to accept that you ought to have eaten the apple. Maybe there is something different about epistemic normativity than ethical normativity, or maybe there is something unique about epistemic normativity in the logical domain, but I'm not really sure what that special thing is.
I fail to follow the apple example. Why should I epistemically have eaten the apple? Either I have a true goal (and desire) to eat it or not. If I do, I will not refuse to eat it. If you assume it is a goal, I am assuming it is true, although people don't generally have those sorts of goals, I think. They look more like... lists of preferences and degree of each preferences. Some are core-preferences difficult to change, while others are very mutable.
If by epistemic normativity you mean something like there are x, y, z reasons we should trust when we want to have proper beliefs about things, what I'd say is that this doesn't seem normative to me. I personally value truth very highly as an end in itself, but even if I didn't, truthful information is useful for acting to satisfy your desires, but I don't see why one has some obligation to do so.I f someone doesn't follow the effective means to their ends, they’re being ineffective or foolish, but not violating any norm. If you want a bridge to stand, build it this way; otherwise, it falls. But there’s no moral or rational requirement to build it that way - you just won’t get what you want.
I don’t accept that I “ought to have eaten the apple.” At the very least, I wouldn’t accept this without knowing what you take that to mean. I don’t think there are any irreducibly normative facts at all, nor do I think there are any such thing as “reasons” independent of descriptive facts about the relation between means and ends. So I don’t know what you have in mind when you say that “you ought to have eaten the apple.” I also don’t know why you epistemically ought to have; why not prudential, or some other normative domain?
Could you perhaps explain what you have in mind by epistemic and moral normativity? There’s a good chance I don’t accept the account you have in mind.
What do you say to someone who doesn't share your goals? Eg thinks that happiness is only justified if it's earned, and that most people do not deserve it, as they do "bad thing X", and being against promoting happiness to them
Generally parallel things to what I'd say to someone with different fundamental epistemic standards, like:
Your sense is just vibes.
Some things may be true depending on what you mean by true. worth believing would presuppose realism depending on what you mean by "worth". If this sentence matters to your argument then the whole thing is circular.
obviously not true, but peter addresses this.
again you are presupposing and/or being circular.
There isn't a coherent argument here. It's just you coming to the table with your priors and handwaving them. I appreciate you saying your piece but I don't find this even mildly compelling and struggling to understand the level of agreement.
Everyone has fundamental assumptions. You could imagine someone who disagrees with yours calling them "just vibes" or "presuppositions", but that doesn't yet establish that there's anything wrong with your assumptions. To show an error, the critic would need to put forward some (disputable) positive claims of their own.
The level of agreement just shows that plenty of others share my starting assumptions.
If you take arguments to be "circular" whenever a determined opponent could dispute them, I have news for you: there is no such thing as an argument that lacks this feature. (See my note on the limits of argumentation.)
I am trying to articulate (probably wrongly) the disconnect I perceive here. I think 'vibes' might sound condescending, but ultimately, you seem to agree with assumptions (like math axioms) not being amenable to disputation. Like, technically, in philosophical practice, one can try to show, I imagine, that given assumption x some contradiction (or at least, something very generally perceived as wrong and undesirable) follows.
I do share the feeling expressed by Charlie Guthmann here that a lot of starting arguments for moral realists are just of the type 'x is obvious/self-evident/feels good to be/feels worth believing', and when stated in that way, they feel equally obviously false to those who don't share those intuitions, and as magical thinking ('If you really want something, the universe conspires to make it come about' Paulo Coelho style). I feel more productive engaging strategies should just avoid altogether any claims of the mentioned sort, and perhaps start with stating what might follow from realist assumptions that might be convincing/persuasive to the other side, and vice versa.